In early 2022 I got several Sun SPARC servers for free off of a FreeCycle ad: I was recently called out for not providing any sort of update on those devices… so here we go!

Google Photos is wonderful. It backs up my photos and videos, tags them, and makes them available to share with my family.

But I also don’t trust that Google will never accidentally “loose” my photos. Here is the process I use to back up my Google Photos data to a self-hosted instance of Photoprism.

I recently rediscovered an obscure 1997 Simon & Schuster / Marshall Media edutainment game for Windows 95 that I played as a kid: Math Invaders. In this part, we’ll investigate whether we can enter an “editor mode”, hinted at within the strings contained within the program. There’s even a ✨surprise ending✨ that I didn’t see coming!

Language is strange – why do we say “hang up the phone” even when using a cell phone? This page documents some examples of “skeuomorphisms” in our common vernacular.

I’ll be updating this page as I come across more!

I recently rediscovered an obscure 1997 Simon & Schuster / Marshall Media edutainment game for Windows 95 that I played as a kid: Math Invaders. In this part, we’ll investigate disassembling and reverse engineering the binary to identify an undocumented settings file format.

I recently rediscovered an obscure 1997 Simon & Schuster / Marshall Media edutainment game for Windows 95 that I played as a kid: Math Invaders. Let’s reverse engineer the game a bit and see what we can find; are there any secrets, unused assets, etc?

Recently I began using Oh My Posh for PowerShell 7+ (pwsh). One thing I noticed however is that it takes upward of a second to activate in my pwsh $profile. Let’s dig in and see if we can’t improve that.

Sidneys1.com is built statically using Jekyll, and then published on the world wide web, GitHub Pages, Tor, and IPFS. How is this all accomplished, and how can you host your own website this way? Let’s walk through it step by step. We’ll be looking into (over the course of several posts):

• Building a website with Jekyll
• Hosting on NearlyFreeSpeech.net
• Customizing the site layout and adding useful features
• Hosting on GitHub Pages
• Hosting on IPFS
• Hosting on Tor

Here’s a quick roundup of the retrocomputing projects I worked on and devices I’ve acquired! Since this is the first year I started collecting retro computers, it will also contain a few items that I’ve had for over a year as well.

Since I started programming I’ve had a dream in the back of my mind: raytracers are super cool, and I’d like to build one myself. But with that dream accompanied another thought: raytracers are nearly a pure expression of math, a discipline I am poorly qualified for.

However this winter I discovered a new programming community, OneLoneCoder, and its leader, javidx9. Watching the videos produced by javidx9 inspired me to take a leap of faith in myself and start this raytracing project. The result has been amazing to see unfold as I developed first a working prototype in C#, then in C++, and finally as I produced what hopefully is an easy to follow “tutorial” style Git repository. So, lets dive in!